Symbolizing the Painted Architecture

Metaphorical Representations of Urban and Architectural Space in Late Medieval Italian Painting

Abstract

Painting is one of the easiest and most effective means of creating a poetic architecture. Such an assertion is easily verified in the Trecento and Quattrocento Italian painting. Studying the works of most of the Italian painters of these two centuries we can find at least five forms of poetic “idealization” of urban and architectural space: the “logic” of the incongruity; transparencies of the opacity; the fragment as a whole; the town as a house, the house as a town; the town as a scenic setting. Through the analysis of twenty-three paintings of Duccio, Giotto, Pietro Lorenzetti, Taddeo Gaddi, Lippo Vanni, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Uccello, Fra Filippo Lippi, Piero della Francesca, Benozzo Gozzoli, Botticelli and Perugino, in this paper we intend to highlight these five types of symbolic invention of architecture.